The prodigious Canadian writer Margaret Atwood is about to publish her latest
novel. Just don’t call her an 'icon’ or put her on a pedestal.

The author Margaret Atwood speaks with a queenly drawl that suggests nothing could surprise her, little could impress her.

It’s a drawl so quiet that I find myself leaning across the café table, craning and straining for her words.If she notices this, she’s choosing to ignore it, but then Atwood is used to people bending (in my case, literally) to her every pronouncement.

In the 49 years that the 73-year-old has been publishing (her prodigious bibliography includes more than 30 novels and books of poetry) she’s become one of Canada’s most famous exports – a bestselling writer and a beloved cultural figure.

We meet in Toronto, where she lives, and in the time we spend talking she’s accosted by no fewer than four acolytes. Holding court seems to be her default mode.

She’s dressed all in black, her white-grey hair in a stiff corona, and her fearsomely lively eyes are an engaging contrast with that slow and slightly supercilious voice.

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Atwood is about to publish MaddAddam, the third novel of a dystopian, futuristic trilogy that began with Oryx and Crake in 2003 and continued in 2009 withThe Year of the Flood.

The "flood" refers not to water, but to a man-made catastrophe, an almost comically gruesome pandemic that causes human bodies to deliquesce like "raspberry mousse".

In MaddAddam, the story follows Toby and Ren, two women who finds themselves in an environmental Christian sect called God’s Gardeners.

I suggest to Atwood that if she were a God’s Gardener, she’d be like Toby and welcome the eco-lifestyle while resisting the dogma. "That tends to be my stance in life," she responds, drily.

My favourite creation within the huge world she’s imagined are the pacifist Crakers, a biogenetically engineered humanoid species who eat grass, purr and glow blue. Some of the funniest sections of the novel are the conversations Toby has with them as they insist, childlike, on story after story.

Atwood as a young woman in 1966

Atwood clearly feels this need – to tell and hear stories – is something that can’t and shouldn’t be bioengineered away.

"Not if you want people to remain human," she says. "As soon as you have a language that has a past tense and a future tense you’re going to say, 'Where did we come from, what happens next?' The ability to remember the past helps us plan the future."

There’s a quote by the speculative fiction writer William Gibson of which Atwood is particularly fond: "The future’s already here but it’s unevenly distributed" – and it feels particularly pertinent in relation to this trilogy. "Some of the things in Oryx and Crake were real in 2003," she says.

The book’s glowing green rabbits, for example, as well as genetically modified pigs. Other elements of the book "aren’t quite real but they could be".

That "could be" is central to Atwood’s own definition of the kind of fictions she makes – not, she insists, "science" fiction, but, like Gibson, "speculative" fiction. "The divide is 'couldn’t happen'," she explains.

"Some people get very prickly about it because they think you’re dissing science fiction. That’s not what I’m doing, I’m simply pointing out I cannot write those books. Much as I’m a devotee of Star Trek, I’m not good at writing them.

"And I can’t write dragons, either. Not my wheelhouse. That doesn’t mean I can’t read them. Can’t write Moby Dick, either. Very keen on it. And that’s not a realistic novel, by the way."

Science fiction or speculative fiction, the trilogy paints a pretty grim picture of what might happen to life on earth, but Atwood doesn’t see it that way.

"I don’t really think of it in those terms. I think they’re cheering books because so far they’re only books. I’m too old to be horrified by these things because they’re part of human nature. It’s like saying, 'Are you horrified that there are cockroaches living in nuclear reactors?' Well, no, I’m not, because it’s life exploiting every niche."

Atwood was born in Ottawa, Ontario, in 1939, the middle child of Margaret Dorothy, a nutritionist, and Carl Edmund Atwood, an entomologist.

Her father’s work meant that the family spent half of each year in a remote cabin in the backwoods of northern Quebec, with no electricity and lots of bugs. When Atwood wasn’t immersed in nature, she was reading – voraciously, precociously.

"I grew up in the golden age of Flash Gordon and sci-fi," she reminds me.

Atwood with her father in Ontario in 1942

"Ray Bradbury was publishing his classic works right then and there. I mean, you were reading them hot off the press." The same held for George Orwell, who left a huge impression on her.

Like most children, Atwood wrote stories but, unlike most, she decided very early on to commit herself to becoming a novelist and declared her intention to write the great Canadian novel in her school-yearbook entry.

In 1957 she enrolled at Victoria College at the University of Toronto and began publishing poetry in the college literary journal.

After graduating in 1961 she won a Woodrow Wilson scholarship to study at Harvard where she gained her Master’s degree. She began further graduate studies, but abandoned her dissertation, 'The English Metaphysical Romance’.

Her novel-writing career began in 1969 with the proto-feminist work The Edible Woman, which explored female body image a decade before Susie Orbach’s Fat is a Feminist Issue.

Men have been known to tell her that her books have saved their marriage. "People come up to you and say, 'Your writing has changed my life,'" she says.

"What they really mean is you’ve changed the way they look at the world. If something of yours happens to be of help to them that’s wonderful, but it wasn’t me waving any kind of magic wand – the book is the intermediary."

How has her definition of feminism developed over the years? "Do I feel that feminism is a set of human rights..?" she begins. (She is fond of posing questions to herself out loud. I suspect she finds mine insufficiently precise.)

"Yes, because I radically think that women are human beings and therefore they have all the variety that other human beings have. But just because some of them are wonderful, some of them are terrible and most of them are in between, that should not have any bearing on the laws."

Atwood followed The Edible Woman with Surfacing (1972) but The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), set in a misogynistic theocracy that seemed to presage the Taliban regime, remains her best-known work.

Do the words "national treasure" strike terror in her heart? "I think more terror is struck by the word 'icon'," she says. "All these things set a standard of behaviour that you don’t necessarily wish to live up to. If you’re put on a pedestal you’re supposed to behave yourself like a pedestal type of person. Pedestals actually have a limited circumference. Not much room to move around."

Atwood in Cambridge, Massachusetts

She doesn’t, despite her enormous output, write every day. "You always think, 'Oh, if only I had a little chalet in the mountains! How great that would be and I’d do all this writing…' Except, no, I wouldn’t. I’d do the same amount of writing I do now and the rest of the time I’d go stir crazy. If you’re waiting for the perfect moment you’ll never write a thing because it will never arrive. I have no routine. I have no foolproof anything. There’s nothing foolproof."

In 1968 she married Jim Polk, a writer, but the couple divorced five years later. Her partner for the past 38 years has been Graeme Gibson, a fellow writer and bird-watcher.

One journalist was so impressed by his devotion that she wrote, "Every woman writer should be married to Graeme Gibson." Atwood put those words on a T-shirt and gave it to him.

"He thought it was funny," she says. "He’s pretty good – he mostly just keeps out of the way. And I don’t show him my books before they’re in print. I recommend it. Supposing your spouse doesn’t like your work – then you’re in trouble."

In the early years of their relationship the couple lived on a farm in a small rural community in Alliston, Ontario, with Gibson's two teenage sons but after their daughter, Jess, was born in 1976, they decided to give up the agricultural life, moving to Toronto in 1980.

Both Atwood and Gibson are stalwart environmental campaigners as well as joint honorary presidents of the Rare Bird Club and members of Canada’s Green Party. When did her environmental epiphany come?

"I just grew up with this stuff. It’s been dinner-table conversation since 1948," she says, impatiently. "This is not new stuff – it's been predicted time and time again, and we’re on course for what was predicted."

Soft and chatty Atwood is not, and it doesn’t take much to launch her into full-blown lecture mode. At one point, for example, I find myself listening to a lengthy disquisition on the role of money in the 19th-century novel.

On Twitter, however, she’s the opposite – inclusive, generous and playful, 140 characters at a time. "It’s like having a little radio show," she says. Or, I’d counter, a rather big radio show: her followers now number well over 400,000.

"It’s also," she says, "like being at a party. And therefore I mostly pass along stuff that concerns other people. Little moments of serendipity happen and they’re really quite silly."

She limits her tweeting time to a lean 10 minutes a day, but Twitter isn’t her only online enthusiasm. She’s a champion of all sorts of digital innovations and recently published a zombie story – a collaboration with the British novelist Naomi Alderman – on the self-publishing site Wattpad.

"I could sit in a rocking-chair," she adds, laconically, "and everyone would think I was normal. Instead, I get, 'Oh my goodness, you’re so engaged!' But that’s just curiosity, it’s not a feeling that I have to be engaged."

Our conversation turns to Instagram and the phenomenon of the "selfie" (photographic self-portrait). Does she think our age is more narcissistic than others? Not a bit. "I say they should enjoy it while they can. You’ll be happy later to have taken pictures of yourself when you looked good. It’s human nature. And it does no good to puritanically say, 'Oh, you shouldn’t be doing that,' because people do.

"So there are ages in which it’s discouraged and there are other ages in which it’s wildly encouraged and we happen to be in the wildly encouraged age at this moment. It’ll change back."

Does she consider herself an optimist? "Any writer is an optimist," she shoots back. "Why? Number one: they think they’ll finish their book. Number two: they think somebody will publish it. Number three: they think somebody will read it. That’s a lot of optimism. It’s optimistic in and for itself because it believes in human communication."

That, I suggest, seems an appropriate sentiment on which to end. "Yes," she nods and makes a modest smile.